Hebrew Bible: Genesis 1-3

I became interested in the Adam and Eve story after reading Paradise Lost. I have been thinking about working through the Biblical and Apocryphal stories for some time, and have now taken up that rather monumental task. I am using the English Standard Version (ESV) of the Bible, because it is an 'essentially literal' translation.

Naturally, I began with Genesis.

Genesis 1-3 Summary

Genesis begins with God hovering over the primordial waters and creating light, the first day. On the 2nd day, God separates the water to form an expanse called heaven; on the 3rd, God gathers the water below heaven into seas, allowing dry land, earth, to appear; on the 4th, God creates the stars, the Sun, the Moon, marine animals, and birds; on the 5th, land animals. And on the 6th day God creates man and woman, and gives them dominion over all things. At the end of each day, God sees that it is good. That is the first chapter.

The second chapter begins by telling us that God rested on the 7th day and blessed it as holy. Then there is a jarring transition to a different, contradictory creation story. The Earth exists, but is empty of everything except a fine mist which is watering the ground. God creates man out of dust, breathes the breath of life into him, and makes the Garden of Eden.

He tells the man to keep the garden and do whatever he wants, except break the One Commandment: no eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which is in the centre of the garden, next to the Tree of Life. Simple.

Then God says, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” So creates all the living creatures out of the ground, and sends them to the man, for him to name. But none of the creatures were good enough helpers, so God puts the man to sleep, steals a rib, heals his flesh, and makes a woman out of the rib. When the man wakes, he declares that this new creature shall be called a 'woman'.

The man and woman were happy in Eden, and unashamedly naked. End of Chapter 2.

Chapter 3 covers the Fall of Man. The serpent tells the woman that eating the forbidden fruit will make her godlike, and she believes it. The woman and the man eat the forbidden fruit. They notice they are naked, make some loincloths out of fig leaves, and hide from God.

Gods finds them and asks WTF is going on? The man blames the woman. The woman blames the serpent. God curses all three: the serpent to lie on its belly; the woman to be pained in childbirth; the man, Adam, to have to work the ground for food until he dies.

Adam then gives the woman a proper name: Eve. God makes clothes for them.

“Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—” says God, and expels Adam and Eve from Eden, leaving the entrance guarded by a cherub with a flaming sword. End of Chapter 3.

Discussion

The first two chapters of the Bible contradict each other. God creates things in different orders: man and woman last; man first, woman last. In Paradise Lost, this was interpreted as God making the creatures on the 4th and 5th days, then sending them to man on the 6th day to be named, before creating Eve. But that is not what I get from the wording:

'Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” Now out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them.'

So I did a bit of research.

The first creation story is the more recent of the two: the scholarly consensus is that it was written around 6th century B.C. The name of God used in the original Hebrew is 'Elohim', which is actually a plural word best translated as 'the powerful ones'. The singular form is 'Eloha', which is not used in the original. God switches between plural and singular first-person pronouns within Genesis 1:

“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

And:

“Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit."

The second story is older: scholars estimate it was written around 10th century B.C. In the Hebrew original, God's name is given as 'YHWH'. These four letter are called the 'tetragrammaton' by scholars. How 'YHWH' is pronounced is unknown, because the ancient Jews considered God's name too holy to say aloud; instead, they said 'adonay', which is the Hebrew word for 'lord'. Over the centuries, the vowels from 'adonay' were combined with 'YHWH' to form 'Yahowah', which became 'Jehovah' (I wonder how many Jehovah's Witnesses know this?). The English word 'God' is derived from the German 'Gott' and has no relation to any word in either the Hebrew Old Testament originals or the Greek New Testament originals.

After they eat the forbidden fruit, God says, 'Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil.'

'Like one of us.' Who is the rest of this 'us'?

In both creation stories, God seems to suggest that there is more than just one. Two obvious, conflicting explanations spring to mind:

1) The stories betray their polytheistic roots.

2) The stories hint at God's triune nature: the three as one, the one as three; both singular and plural.

The names of Adam and Eve are introduced in Genesis 2. The humans are not named in Genesis 1. 'Adam' is the Hebrew word for 'man', and it is from here that the proper name Adam is derived. It is similar to 'adamah', the Hebrew word for 'clay'. Unlike Eve, Adam is not given his name,  the narrative just switches between calling him 'the man' and 'Adam'. 

If the Bible is true, then Hebrew is one of the myriad post-Babel languages. The original pre-Babel language is lost to us. Adam and Eve, if they existed, might not have been called Adam and Eve. These names might just be the Hebrew versions of their original names, in the same way that Michael becomes Michiel, Michel, Michele, Miguel, Mihail, Mikhail, etc in various other languages. We might not know what they were actually called.

Which brings to the topic of whether the Bible is true. If the creation stories of the Bible are based on actual events, then the story was passed on for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years by oral tradition, before the invention of writing. It also would have gone through a bottleneck at the Great Flood: all future versions were based off what Noah's family could remember and pass on. Then there was the Tower of Babel and the loss of the original language; all future versions were translations of the original. And the English Bibles we have are translations of those translations. Imperfections building up over millennia. 

In an early version of the YHWH creation story, YHWH places a 'winged half-human, half-lion creature' to guard Eden, instead of a cherub with a flaming sword.

As the ESV Bible Translation Team put it:

"We know that no Bible translation is perfect or final; but we also know that God uses imperfect and inadequate things to his honor and praise."

If the Bible is based on true events, it is not a perfect record of them. It contradicts itself too obviously for that. Faith in God and Jesus seems quite independent of faith in a particular version of the Bible. I say 'particular version of the Bible' not just because of the multitudinous translations, but also because the composition of The Bible varies between churches, and in the same church over time. Wikipedia has a handy chart about this.  So does this website. Faith in a particular version of the Bible seems more like faith in the council of humans that decided on its content, rather than faith in God.

Which brings me to the Apocrypha. For those that don't know, the Apocrypha is made up of the non-canonical books, the books that were rejected from the Bible. 

Why would one want to read the Apocrypha? 

1) It'll be interesting and/or entertaining.

2) They might have truth in them. It was humans who rejected them, after all. Some of them have been considered canon by mainstream churches. Some of them are still considered canon by a minority of churches.

3) There is an obvious influence of the Apocrypha on modern Christian beliefs. The idea of Mary's Immaculate Conception is not biblical: it comes from the apocryphal Gospel of James (also called The Protevangelium). The idea that Satan is a fallen archangel is not biblical: it comes from the apocryphal Book of Enoch. Both of these ideas are common to modern Christian belief, but they are not biblical in origin.

As one scholar puts it: 'It is not too much to say that no modern can intelligently understand the New Testament unless he is acquainted with the so-called 'Apocrypha'. The very words of Jesus were in many instances, suggested by sayings current in his day, more or less unconscious quotations from the Testaments of the 12 Patriarchs.'

Having started this task I now realise quite how long the Bible and Apocrypha are. I cannot be bothered reading all of it, but will aim for the majority over a number of years.

Sources

ESV Bible, Notes and Introduction 

The Forgotten Books of Eden, Introduction

Creation Stories from Around the World

'Paradise Lost and Regained' by John Milton

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

Paradise Lost (PL) is considered one of the greatest works in the English language, and with good reason: it is totes awesome; like, really, really awesome. PL is an epic retelling of the world's most popular creation myth: the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It is not considered canon by any churches, as far as I know, which makes it Bible fanfic, Christian Fiction, or High Fantasy, you decide. Whichever way, it is an epic poem, and it is so very epic.

 Milton's well chosen words conjured such vivid imagery that I felt like I had a private screening of an extremely high budget blockbuster movie in my head. PL has everything in it to be a big box office hit:

• Grand battles during the Empyrean Civil War, and boy that war escalated quickly: in the first battle they only used swords and stuff, by the final battle the angels are throwing mountains at each other before God decides to intervene. Archangel Michael and Satan have a super epic duel.
• Raunchy sex. Let's just say that before God cursed it to forever lie on its belly, the serpent stood very erect in Eden, if you know what I mean.
• Tension. There's a really tense bit where Gabriel finds Satan in Eden and a squadron of angels gathers to arrest him and send him back to Hell but Satan adopts his Giant Demon Form and you're like 'oh no it's gonna kick off and Eden's gonna be trashed'.
• Stunning visuals. The flaming and frozen wastelands of Hell. Pandaemonium, Hell's capital city, designed by Mulciber, formerly one of Heaven's greatest architects. The Garden of Eden. The Creation of Earth. Earth's conversion from a paradise to its current state.
  
  
  [A digression: Back when I was in high school our Religious Education teacher told us, in the lesson on arguments for and against God's existence, that the Earth was so perfectly placed that if the axis were tilted 1 degree further towards the Sun, all life would fry, and if it were tilted 1 degree away, all life would freeze, and when you think about this it seems impossible that it could've happened by chance so God must have placed it there so perfectly.
  
  
  Very shortly after this lesson I discovered that what she had said was bullshit. There is a habitable zone around the Sun in which life is capable of surviving. Axial tilt varies over millennia, life has survived. Axial tilt is responsible for seasons: when the northern hemisphere is pointed towards the sun, it is Summer; when it is pointed away, it is Winter. Thus, any part of the Earth not on the equator will be a different distance from the Sun at different times of the year, and life survives.
  
  I was able to forgive the teacher, because I assumed that this must have been a fairly recent discovery for her to have missed out on it.
  
  Not so: Milton, writing in the 17th century, knew that the axis was responsible for seasons. After Adam and Eve succumb to temptation, God gets the angels to make some changes to Earth so it is no longer a Paradise, which includes rotating the axis to give the planet its seasons. Before the Fall, Earth was perpetually in springtime.
  
  I don't like being lied to, and think lying in defence of God is incredibly damaging to the Church, as is denial of scientific discoveries: a true religion with a true God has no need to fear science increasing man's knowledge, because it can only lead to a greater appreciation of the majesty and complexity of Creation. Only false gods fear being found out.]
• Despair and, ultimately, hope. After they mess up, Adam and Eve are Not Very Happy: they consider suicide rather than letting their progeny live in a wrecked world. To cheer them up, Michael shows them great and terrible visions of the future, of Cain and Abel, of the sinful, of the flood, of humanity's great empires and kingdoms, and of the eventual redemption of Man through the Son of God. Tearful, they leave Eden and see the rest of the world before them. Overall, the ending is optimistic about humanity's prospects. A feel-good ending, if you will.

In the opening, Milton says that he is writing the poem to 'justify the ways of God to men', and there is considerable controversy over how well he has done this. Morally, the poem has aged: there has been a lot moral progress since it was written. Milton's God is a tyrant, and Satan is a rebel fighting for freedom. Satan is the most developed character; he is the protagonist of the first few books, and his quest to ruin Adam and Eve is almost a heroic quest for vengeance against the cruel God. Milton's beliefs are not conventionally Christian: he rejects the Trinity: the Son of God is a separate, lesser entity to the Father God; there is no mention of the Holy Spirit. I can't help but think that Milton has unwillingly written a poem which, because of attitude changes over the centuries, now reads as an attempt to justify the ways of Satan to men. Maybe Satan was Milton's muse all along!

Milton is not very nice to women. I got the impression from PL that he had some serious issues in this regard. He repeatedly calls for the complete subjugation of women by men, saying that they were made for servitude. He is not very nice to Eve, who he sees as the cause of all man's woe: she is the weaker half of the first human pair; she succumbs to Satan's tempting, and convinces Adam to sin too, because Adam is in love with her. She is treated worse than the heroic Satan. Later, when they realise they have messed up, Adam has a big rant about how annoying women are, and how it would have been much better if God had only created men, and since the angels seem to cope well enough loving each other while all being masculine (there is a really awkward bit earlier in the poem when Adam asks Raphael if angels in heaven love each other like him and Eve do; Raphael blushes and awkwardly tries to explain that they do and the love between angels is a purer, greater love than the love between humans), why couldn't God have thought of some other way to make new humans instead of through women. Issues much.

Paradise is a beautiful work of art, and is not ruined by Milton's archaic opinions. I can see why it is held in such regard. Highly recommended. The in-head blockbuster movie was so good I wanted to buy merchandise afterwards. However, it is a classic you have to be ready to enjoy. You have to be able to comfortably read and enjoy 17th century English. So, if you read this section:

'Wide was spread

That war and various; sometimes on firm ground
A standing fight, then, soaring on main wing,
Tormented all the air; all air seemed then
Conflicting fire. Long time in even scale
The battle hung; till Satan, who that day
Prodigious power had shown, and met in arms
No equal, ranging through the dire attack
Of fighting Seraphim confused, at length
Saw where the sword of Michael smote, and felled
Squadrons at once; with huge two-handed sway
Brandished aloft, the horrid edge came down
Wide-wasting; such destruction to withstand
He hasted, and opposed the rocky orb
Of tenfold adamant, his ample shield,
A vast circumference. At his approach
The great Archangel from his warlike toil
Surceased, and glad, as hoping here to end
Intestine war in Heaven, the arch-foe subdued
Or captive dragged in chains, with hostile frown
And visage all inflamed first thus began.'

And think 'Da fuk did I just read?' or feel the need to lie down and rest, you need to level up your reading skill before attempting this badboy.

If, however, you read that and got that battle was cray cray, sometimes on land, sometimes on air, and was an even match for a long time until Satan, who had managed to beat everyone he had fought so far, spotted Michael, who was kickin' ass with his badass fiery sword wiping out whole squadrons of rebel angels in one swipe (like Sauron in the prologue to Lord of the Rings), hurried towards him with his shield which he thought would block Michael's sword, Michael saw Satan approach, stopped fighting, hoping to end the war by beating Satan, and starts speaking with a hostile frown on his face, then you should be ready to enjoy this beast of a poem.

Paradise Lost is the first epic poem I have ever read, and it convinced me to read more of the form. So I read the sequel to PL: Paradise Regained (PR). Smaller in both scope and length, PR is an enjoyable, but ultimately disappointing, sequel. PR deals with Jesus' last days in the desert, when Satan tempts him with food and riches, but Jesus resists and wins. It feels silly to complain that the ending of PR feeling like a deus ex machina, given that the protagonist is the Son of God, but it does feel that way. Very abrupt, too.